CHARLOTTE SALOMON 1917 - 1943

​Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, before I climb out of bed and get caught up in the maelstrom of my own daily existence, I close my eyes in order to look over my life – a succession of scenes, fragments, people, events, mistakes, actions, expectations and moments of emptiness. It is all there, waiting in the darkness for me to illuminate it, for the colours to become visible and assume concrete form. My memories of the exhibition I saw at Berlin’s Jewish Museum in autumn 2007 are still strong. I had not seen Charlotte Salomon’s work before and I found it extremely moving.

Charlotte Salomon was only 23 years old and living in exile in France when she painted the first of the 1,325 gouaches she would produce between 1940 and 1942; in the space of only 18 months, and in secret, she compiled a visual autobiography. She painted these pictures as a way of dealing with an existential crisis brought on by her grandmother’s suicide. A number of women in Charlotte’s family – including her mother – took their own lives. The narrative content of her paintings describes one of the darkest and most challenging periods in human history. As a young German-Jewish artist who was born in Berlin, she was also attempting to escape the fate that had become part of her family legacy.

Salomon used only the primary colours and white in her paintings. I remember that the predominant colour in the exhibition I saw was orange – a colour that is said to have an antidepressant effect. Her oeuvre combines images, texts and music in a way that conveys great emotional and lyrical depth. She described her major work – a series of 769 paintings entitled “Leben? oder Theater?” (Life? or Theatre?) – as an operetta in pictures, consisting of a prologue, a main section and an epilogue. The production of these works was accompanied by classical music and the songs she hummed to herself while painting. The depicted figures are all closely connected to the story of her life but have been given pseudonyms. Having completed her autobiography, Charlotte Salomon gave it to a trusted friend for safekeeping. In 1943 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she and her unborn child were murdered soon after her arrival.

By presenting multiple scenes and occurrences within single images, Salomon creates a great sense of urgency that reflects not only the endless flow of thoughts and memories, but also the constant pressure caused by social and political changes in the world around her. The earlier works are highly detailed images layered with texts, while the later ones are much less detailed and more expressionistic – colours tell the story and the gestural brushstrokes have moved closer to those of Art Informel. In her final works, text is the main protagonist and has become the subject matter.

The very last image shows Charlotte in a bathing suit, kneeling on a beach with brush and paper in hand. Inscribed upon her back are the words “LEBEN ODER THEATER”.

In the closing words of the epilogue she writes:“…she had to vanish for a while from the human surface and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew from the depths.”(image no. 4924v)